Savor the season’s last cold-tolerant crops while you prep your garden for hibernation.

Credit: Stephen Devries

A gardener’s chore list this time of year depends on location: Those of us down South, like in our Alabama garden, can use row covers and poly tunnels to create encouragingly warm beds for hearty salad greens, kale, collards, and cabbage (see our recipes for two autumn favorites, radicchio and watercress, below). And frost blankets beat back the winter blues, allowing pockets of warm air to keep greens growing underneath.

However, if deep snow and single-digit temps are the norm where you live, it’s smart to put the garden to bed. Let nature do the work of building rich soil teeming with organic matter and enriching garden beds for spring plantings: Pile soil high with leaves raked, bagged, or borrowed. These decompose into viable leaf mold and block early spring weeds. Although you won’t have the satisfaction of getting your hands dirty outside, you can relish the fireside opportunity to thumb through seed catalogs, daydreaming of spring while you cover garden beds with cozy blankets and settle them in for a long winter’s nap.

Don’t forget your containers! | Credit: FIRINA/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

If you use pots and planters in your garden design, make sure they won’t freeze and crack with the changing temperatures. Empty, scrub, and store clay pots indoors (or try buffering the room for expansion by wedging a layer of bubble wrap inside the container wall before filling with soil each spring). Resin, poly, or metal containers don’t need this special treatment.